Youth Against Settlements شباب ضد الاستيطان
Izzat Karaki (center), a Youth Against Settlements volunteer, marches in the 2019 Open Shuhada Street demonstration.
In early August, Israel approved 2,300 new settlement units in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem for Jewish-Israeli citizens—a move deemed illegal under international law.
This comes only a few days after a July 31 meeting between Middle East envoy and son-in-law to the U.S. President, Jared Kushner, and officials in Israeli officials over a “peace plan,” which was widely received as impractical.
For many who live here, the expansion of settlements is seen as one of the main obstacles to peace, and a stake in the heart of a two-state solution. The international community displays what the United Nations has called a “dangerous paralysis,” unable (or unwilling) to hold Israel accountable for violations of human rights and international law. Israel, emboldened by the Trump Administration, has boosted spending on new settlements 39 percent in 2017.
But while the foreign policy community does next to nothing to end what Palestinians view as illegal land grabs, one unique local group is pushing back. Youth Against Settlements, known as YAS, is the only organized grassroots group of its kind in Palestine, founded in Hebron and, notably, nonpartisan. This is a rare feature of Palestinian political groups and a source of tension with both the occupying Israeli power and the Palestinian Authority itself.
“We try to promote nonviolent resistance among Palestinian youth,” Issa Amro, YAS founder and Hebron native, tells The Progressive. “We try to defend Palestinian identity in Hebron and expose Israeli human rights violations.”
Among the group’s multi-faceted efforts protesting Israeli occupation include guided tours “intended to convey the experience of living under the occupation of the West Bank,” reported The New Yorker earlier this year.
“Palestinians can do something,” Izzat Karaki, a YAS volunteer tells The Progressive. “Sometimes it’s not easy, but you have to try. You have to show solidarity or show that we are still fighting this occupation.”
Karaki, thirty, has been volunteering with YAS since 2009. The group is based in the heart of Hebron’s Old City, a place that more than any other in the West Bank feels the direct violent impacts of settlement expansion.
Similar to neighborhoods in Palestinian East Jerusalem, Hebron’s “pocket settlements” are small communities of usually ultra-religious Israeli-Jews that take over abandoned or evicted Palestinian homes. Sometimes, settlers move in right on top of Palestinian families, taking over the top floors of buildings.
This close proximity spells out frequent tension and conflict.
“There is a lot of fear,” says Um Yosef, fifty, a resident of the neighborhood Tel Rumeida in the occupied area of the Old City. “I am always nervous for my children, especially when they are out of the house. At any point they will be in danger,” she adds, referring to daily harassment from Israeli settlers and soldiers.
Since the 1997 Hebron Protocol, agreed on after the Ibrahimi mosque massacre which claimed twenty-nine Palestinian lives, the Israeli military has occupied 20 percent of the Old City. Known as H2, this occupied area is home to roughly 40,000 Palestinians and “a few hundred Israeli settlers living in five settlement compounds,” according to a 2018 United Nations Office of Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs report.
“It’s like a prison,” Yosef says. “I can’t feel the Eid [the holiest Muslim holiday of the year, which took place on Sunday] properly, like other people. They go, they have fun, they visit each other but I can’t stay for a long time out of the house.” She cites her fear of settlers or closure of military checkpoints, of which there are twenty-two inside and around the Old City. These military checkpoints are subject to irregular closures and are often sites of harassment from soldiers.
This is where YAS steps in.
“As Palestinians, we demonstrate and protest and screen films, visit families, to let people understand what is going on,” Karaki adds. “We also go abroad to reach more people to tell them about the life here and our experience as activists and living under Israeli control.”
The group’s main weapon is the camera. The thirty or so full-time Palestinian volunteers, along with the occassional international volunteer, respond to calls of attacks or harassment and arrive on-scene to monitor the situation. Most mornings, they accompany groups of children to school, armed with cameras, to protect them from possible harassment. Pictures and videos are shared with a global audience over social media or are used for direct family aid.
“As Palestinians, we demonstrate and protest and screen films, visit families, to let people understand what is going on.”
Yosef, whose twenty-year-old son and twenty-five-year-old daughter volunteer with YAS, explains that if she goes to the police station to file a complaint, “they won’t believe me unless we have a video.”
“With nonviolence, you can do something for your community,” Karaki says, emphasizing the dehumanizing effect the occupation has on him. He says they degrade him and his people to simple ID numbers that allow them to pass through the multiple checkpoints just to go home or pray in the mosque.
And for Karaki, nonviolence is the only way. “Nonviolence affects the occupation more than anything else,” he insists. “There is no balance [of power] and its enough for us. Even if we had power, its enough of us killed.”
YAS’s biggest action of the year is its annual Open Shuhada Street campaign. Shuhada Street, the once-bustling city center of Hebron, became a ghost town after the 1994 Ibrahimi mosque massacre by American-born Israeli settler Baruch Goldstein left twenty-nine Palestinians dead.
Since then, Palestinian shops on the street have been closed, and families have to go through checkpoints to reach their homes there. Every February, YAS and community supporters organize a week of events culminating in a peaceful march to a military checkpoint, protesting the now twenty-five-year-long occupation of the Old City.
Apart from direct actions, YAS also supports the community with funding from individual donations. “We just founded a community center in the Silam neighborhood by the mosque,” says Amro, “and we established a kindergarten in Tel Rumeida.”
“The [YAS] center helped us with cleaning the yard around my house. The electricity for the house, they fixed it for us,” Yosef adds.
The effect of this community support is palpable. The courage of the anti-occupation fighters at YAS have helped instill courage in others. “When I go down from H2 to the center of the city [in H1] I go alone. I go between the settlers and the army—there is nothing to be afraid of now.”
But this courage doesn’t come without a price. “We suffer a lot of intimidation, harassment, detention, arrest,” Amro explains, who has been arrested over a hundred times himself and is currently waiting for a number of Israeli military court hearings. “The Israeli occupation tries to blackmail us, isolate us from society.”
“We are suffering since the Oslo Agreement in 1993, and after that Hebron Protocol and when they divided the city for H1 and H2,” Karaki says, wearily. “Right now, we are talking about Trump and the Deal of the Century. Everyone’s talking about it, and Hebron is a part of this.”
Karaki feels as though everything has been imposed on Palestinians from a force outside of their power, and that only from there can true change occur. “We don’t know what the future will do and we are trying to send our message to people who live outside Palestine. Maybe they can do something.”
But until then, YAS and the Hebron community will continue to hold off the immediate effects of the occupation with their nonviolent resistance.